“I’ll take my chances. What’s eating him, anyway?”
“I don’t know. He’s been like that all week.”
Klein buzzed him for me, got growls I could hear across the desk, and passed word that I’d have to wait. I waited twenty minutes, watching nothing much going on in the squadroom. Then Eberhardt buzzed out and let me go have an audience.
The air in his office was layered blue with pipe smoke and hot enough to grow orchids. A portable heater glowed on one side of his desk-that in addition to the building’s heating system. Eberhardt was in his shirt sleeves, pawing through a mess of papers, puffing away on a scarred apple briar. Grayish beard stubble coated his cheeks, — his shirt was wrinkled and had a stain of some kind on the front, and his tie was askew. His features still had that blurred look I had noticed yesterday. The bags under his eyes were heavier, too, as if he had slept little or not at all last night.
As soon as I shut the door he said, “You got ten minutes, no more. I’m up to my ass in paperwork today.”
“Sure. How come you’ve got it so hot in here?”
“It’s not hot in here.”
“It must be eighty, Eb, with that heater on.”
“It’s my office, I’ll keep it as hot as I like.”
“Are you feeling okay?”
He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at me, glaring. “You come here for a reason? If you just want to ask dumb questions, get the hell out.”
He was beginning to worry me. But prodding him about it would only make him more close-mouthed. Eberhardt was not a man you could prod about anything.
I went over and sat down in one of the chairs before his desk. “I’m here about Russ Dancer.”
“Klein’s got your statement outside for you to sign.”
“I already signed it. I don’t mean that.”
“What then?”
“I’ve been upstairs talking to Dancer,” I said. “He swears he didn’t kill Frank Colodny.”
“So?”
“I believe him, Eb.”
“I might have known it.” He put the pipe back in his mouth and made angry gnawing sounds on the bit. Then he said, “I suppose you want permission to conduct your own investigation.”
“That’s what I had in mind.”
“You’re a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?” It was something he’d said to me before, many times, but this time there was real rancor in the words. “Always getting mixed up in murder cases, always playing the champion role like one of your lousy magazine private eyes. And I’m supposed to hop to it every time you come sucking around for a favor. You think I like any of that? I got enough grief in this job without stumbling over you every time I turn around.”
I didn’t say anything. Just sat there looking at him.
“Ah, the hell with it. What’s the use in talking to you? “You don’t listen.”
“I’m listening now,” I said.
“Sure you are. Well, listen to this. Dancer is guilty; he’s as guilty as they come. And its your testimony that makes it conclusive.”
“The locked-room angle,” I said.
“That’s right, the locked-room angle. Dancer’s room was on the sixth floor, for starters. The windows were all locked from the inside, and there’s nothing outside any of them except a sheer wall and thin air. The access hall is a cul-de-sac, and that door was locked when you got to it. The connecting door with Oswald Meeker’s room was locked on both sides. You and the maid were out in the main hallway, with a clear view both ways along it, and you both swear the shot came from inside Dancer’s room. Less than a minute later you let yourself in and found Dancer with a gun in his hand and the body on the floor behind him. Okay, bright boy. Go ahead and tell me how he can be innocent and somebody else knocked off Colodny.”
“I can’t tell you how. Unless one of the doors was gimmicked…”
“Well, you can get that idea out of your head. The lab boys went over them; they fit snug in the jamb, both of them, and both bolts turn hard, and there’s no indication of tampering. They’re willing to swear that nobody could have pulled any of that fancy fictional crap, like strings on the dead bolt, even if there had been time for it. Which there wasn’t. You think this is a fancy killing? Like hell it is. It’s a crime of passion, just like ninety percent of all homicides. Premeditated, maybe; that’s up to the courts to decide. But you can’t make one of those goddamn impossible crime things out of it.”
“I’m not trying to,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure angles. Suppose the killer-somebody other than Dancer, for the sake of argument-came out through the hall door and slipped into the room opposite, six-nineteen? There was enough time for somebody to do that; it was at least ten seconds from the time I heard the shot until I got to where I could see into the cul-de-sac.”
“Oh sure, right. And Dancer waved bye-bye to him and locked up again after he left.”
“What if the killer had a key? That hall door can be locked from the outside with a key.”
“Yeah. He came out, locked the door, and disappeared-all in ten seconds. Where did he go, wise guy? Room six-nineteen was vacant, and there aren’t any missing keys to it, and that door wasn’t tampered with either. The maid and a bunch of other citizens were out in the hallway, so he couldn’t have gone by them. You think maybe he hid in the storage closet for a couple of hours and then slipped away when nobody was looking?”
I held up my hands, palms toward him. “Okay, I’m convinced. But was there an extra key to Dancer’s room-on Colodny’s body, maybe?”
“No. The only key he had was the one to his own room. He got inside Dancer’s because Dancer let him in.”
“Well, not necessarily. He could have bribed somebody to let him in with a passkey. The maid, for instance.”
“Nuts. We checked her out; she’s been at the hotel twenty-five years. Nobody lasts that long in a ritzy joint like the Continental without being honest.”
“Somebody else, then. The point is, Colodny could have already been inside the room when Dancer showed up.”
“The hell he could.”
“Why couldn’t he? Eb-”
“Two reasons, that’s why.” He pointed the pipe stem at me again. “In the first place, the maid knocked on Dancer’s door about fifteen minutes before the shooting because it was her time to go in and clean the room. When she didn’t get any answer she assumed nobody was home and used her passkey to let herself in. She found Dancer passed out in the bedroom and beat it out of there. But she was around long enough to swear that the front room was empty and the bathroom, which she could see into because the door was open, was also empty. And if you say anything about a guy hiding under the bed, I’ll laugh in your face.”
“She could have been lying,” I said doggedly.
“Why would she lie?”
“It was just a thought. How long was she in the hallway before I showed up?”
“Half a minute or so. She’d just come out of the next room past the cul-de-sac, six-twenty-one.”
“Did she see or hear anything?”
“Not until you appeared and the gun went off. Listen, get the hell off the maid; her story’s straight, and she’s not involved.” Another jab with the pipe. “And here’s your second reason why nobody could have been hiding in Dancer’s room: how would he have got out after Colodny was dead? What do you think this mythical killer did-wave a magic wand and dematerialize?”
The smoke in there was beginning to irritate my lungs; I could feel my chest tightening up. Now that I had been off tobacco for a couple of years, I no longer had any tolerance for it. I felt like getting up and opening the window to let in some air. But if I did it would only make Eberhardt more antagonistic than he already was.
I said, “Dancer told me all the other Pulpeteers have alibis for the time of Colodny’s death.”
“That’s right,” he said, and then pulled a face. “Pulpeteers. Of all the silly damn names for a bunch of grandfather types. Where’s the dignity in something like that?”